Vietnam War Quotations

You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours,
but even at those odds, you will lose and I will win.

--Ho Chi Minh to the French, late 1940s

You have a row of dominoes set up; you knock over the first
one, and what will happen to the last one is that it will go
over very quickly.

--Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1954

Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and
Vietnam is the place.

--John F. Kennedy, 1961

This is not a jungle war, but a struggle for freedom on
every front of human activity.

--Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964

Tell the Vietnamese they've got to draw in their horns or
we're going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.

--Gen. Curtis LeMay, May 1964

We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand
miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.

--Lyndon Johnson, Oct. 1964

We are at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever
faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars,
and it has been said if we lose that war, and in so doing
lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with
the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to
lose did the least to prevent its happening.

--Ronald Reagan, 1964

We should declare war on North Vietnam. . . .We could pave
the whole country and put parking strips on it, and still be
home by Christmas.

--Ronald Reagan, 1965

I see light at the end of the tunnel.

--Walt W. Rostow, National Security Adviser, Dec. 1967

The war against Vietnam is only the ghastliest
manifestation of what I'd call imperial provincialism,
which afflicts America's whole culture--aware only of its
own history, insensible to everything which isn't part of
the local atmosphere.

--Stephen Vizinczey, 1968

Let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate
the United States. Only Americans can do that.

--Richard M. Nixon, 1969

I'm not going to be the first American president to lose
a war.

--Richard Nixon, Oct. 1969

This war has already stretched the generation gap so wide
that it threatens to pull the country apart.

--Sen. Frank Church, May 1970

By intervening in the Vietnamese struggle the United States
was attempting to fit its global strategies into a world of
hillocks and hamlets, to reduce its majestic concerns for
the containment of communism and the security of the Free
World to a dimension where governments rose and fell as a
result of arguments between two colonels' wives.

--Frances Fitzgerald, 1972

We believe that peace is at hand.

--Henry Kissinger, Oct. 1972

You have my assurance that we will respond with full force
should the settlement be violated by North Vietnam.

--Richard Nixon in a letter to President Thieu, Jan. 1973

If the Americans do not want to support us anymore, let
them go, get out! Let them forget their humanitarian promises!

--Nguyen Van Thieu, April 1975

Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort
of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms
of America--not on the battlefields of Vietnam.

--Marshall McLuhan, 1975

Today, America can regain the sense of pride that existed
before Vietnam. These events, tragic as they are, portend neither the end
of the world nor of America's leadership in the world.

--Gerald Ford, April 1975

Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.

--Michael Herr, 1977

Vietnam presumably taught us that the United States could
not serve as the world's policeman; it should also have
taught us the dangers of trying to be the world's midwife
to democracy when the birth is scheduled to take place
under conditions of guerrilla war.

--Jeane Kirkpatrick, 1979

Some of the critics viewed Vietnam as a morality play in
which the wicked must be punished before the final curtain
and where any attempt to salvage self-respect from the
outcome compounded the wrong. I viewed it as a genuine
tragedy. No one had a monopoly on anguish.

--Henry Kissinger, 1979

It's time that we recognized that ours was in truth a noble
cause.

--Ronald Reagan, Oct. 1980

There is the guilt all soldiers feel for having broken the
taboo against killing, a guilt as old as war itself. Add to
this the soldier's sense of shame for having fought in actions
that resulted, indirectly or directly, in the deaths of
civilians. Then pile on top of that an attitude of social
opprobrium, an attitude that made the fighting man feel
personally morally responsible for the war, and you get
your proverbial walking time bomb.

--Philip Caputo, 1982

Above all, Vietnam was a war that asked everything of a
few and nothing of most in America.

--Myra MacPherson, 1984

Saigon was an addicted city, and we were the drug: the
corruption of children, the mutilation of young men, the
prostitution of women, the humiliation of the old, the
division of the family, the division of the country--it
had all been done in our name. . . . The French city . . . had
represented the opium stage of the addiction. With the Americans
had begun the heroin phase.

--James Fenton, 1985

No event in American history is more misunderstood than the
Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.

--Richard M. Nixon, 1985

The war was won on both sides: by the Vietnamese on the ground,
by the Americans in the electronic mental space. And if the one
side won an ideological and political victory, the other made
Apocalypse Now and that has gone right around the world.

--Jean Baudrillard, 1986

America has made no reparation to the Vietnamese, nothing. We
are the richest people in the world and they are among the
poorest. We savaged them, though they had never hurt us, and
we cannot find it in our hearts, our honor, to give them
help--because the government of Vietnam is Communist. And
perhaps because they won.

--Martha Gellhorn, 1986

I was proud of the youths who opposed the war in Vietnam
because they were my babies.

--Benjamin Spock, 1988

All the wrong people remember Vietnam. I think all the
people who remember it should forget it, and all the people
who forgot it should remember it.